Greece traditions customs & dancing

GREECE
TRADITIONS
Customs & dancing
Tradition in Greece is still part of everyday life. During your holidays here, you’ll meet locals dressed in traditional costumes. In western Crete, the older men still proudly sport their high boots, breeches and black-tasselled kerchiefs; on Karpathos, the women have two sets of costumes, a simple one for every day and a very elaborate, colourful one for festivals and weddings; in Metsovo, on special occasions, you’ll see men in embroidered waistcoats, woolly hats, woven trousers and clogs.
Perhaps, nothing has a more powerful presence in Greece’s everyday culture are traditional dances. Greek communities everywhere love to dance, in couples or in circles, young and old; and in dancing, they celebrate their homeland and their roots… the ties that bind. The musicians playing on handcrafted instruments contribute the rhythm to festivals and parties all year round.
The customs of Greece
Birth, baptism, engagement, wedding, funerals: the milestones that give shape and definition to life and a person’s place in society. If you’re lucky, your holidays in Greece will include witnessing or even taking part in the following:
Traditional weddings that start with dressing the bride and bouncing a baby boy on the nuptial bed; the bride escorted to the church by musicians; the especially complex wedding rituals of Lefkas; the heart-wrenching Maniot dirges, the musical accompaniment on the journey to the other world.
And you’ll find festivities everywhere, but Patras boasts the most organised and famous celebrations where disguises, fertility symbols, wild music, endless dancing, pranks and general frivolity – with roots in pagan fertility rites – precede the austerity of Lent.
Clean Monday, equivalent to Ash Wednesday, ushers in the 40-day fasting period with meatless picnics and a sky full of colourful kites. May Day usually involves making flower wreaths before sunrise, then burning them on Midsummer Eve.
In autumn, the slaughtering of the family pig in Crete and the Aegean islands is a time-honoured ritual, while on Zakynthos, on September 14, the Day of the True Cross, the blessing of the flour and basil for leavening bread takes place
Every region has its own wealth of traditions for these important dates on the calendar, with special holiday dishes, songs or seasonal carols like the Christmas kalanda. On Epiphany, young men on all the islands and coastal regions of the mainland dive into the cold sea to be the one who retrieves the cross thrown by the priest.